Parking this here today, as Substack announces their news publishing platform strategy, as a reminder that 1) people don’t listen the first time they’re warned, and 2) never takes long for harsh reality to unfold.
Over the skies of New Jersey
A bit long and involved, describes “a textbook example of how rumors propagate: a sort of contagion, spread through social networks, shifting how people perceive patterns and interpret anomalies.”
Bluesky, federation and the Ulysses Pact
As usual, Cory Doctorow is spot on. Always know where the exit is.
“Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there.”
The tech realignment against democracy
When governments are forced to choose between trade relations and digital sovereignty, which way will they go? You know the answer already.
On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power | TechPolicy.Press
Taylor Owen writes that the merger of state and tech power is a fundamental challenge to democratic governance in the digital age.
“Who got eaten, who ate them”
Absolutely brilliant meditation by Erin Kissane on the state of the public surface of the Internet. Mostly for industry people who have been wrestling with this for a long long time, but also for those who would like to be more thoughtful about the places in which they stand.
Highly recommended.
Restoring a human Internet
For those of us who still think about these things, a powerful piece about restoring a more healthy and human Internet. You know, the one we planned, not the one we delivered.
The issue we all know
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
we may be able to challenge in an interesting way.
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control.
Good reading for insights and incitement.
Converting to a plant-based lifestyle
More and more frequently my wife Mary and I are asked about our experience with the plant-based lifestyle we began together several years ago, and how new people can get started. Here are some of our best recommendations, collected and organized from a patchwork of conversations with our friends who have been interested in coming along with us.
We’ve included resources like our go-to cookbooks and websites; documentary movies and series that helped us with and still reinforce our decisions; a short list of some of our favorite plant-based brands and where we source our food. We’re not trying to be comprehensive here, only to provide a solid foundation for anyone who is interested in making the move.
Before we begin, let’s get a few important things out of the way:
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- While there are a host of reasons to transition to a plant-based diet, from personal health outcomes to the ethical treatment of animals and especially to help reduce climate change, we’re not going to cover those here because there are plenty of other places to find your own why and to feel comfortable with your decision (including via some of the videos below). For us it’s all of the above. In the end it doesn’t matter which is more or less important to you, it’s that you decided to explore the change.
- We’re not medical professionals and we are not making any evaluation or promises or claims about who can support and sustain a plant-based diet or how it will affect anyone specifically. We can tell you that in our experience we feel more energetic, lighter, younger and happier; we can see the very real changes in our blood panels and body compositions; yes, we get more than enough protein, probably more than most people; and we’ve even run marathons powered completely by plants. Of course your mileage may vary.
- Lifestyle changes like this are a journey, and there can be several stops along the way if you prefer your change to be gradual rather than sudden. Whether it’s first by simply reducing meat consumption by cutting it out a couple of days a week, to becoming vegetarian by completely eliminating meat, to becoming fully vegan (to whatever degree, and there are several levels like belts in karate) by also eliminating dairy, there’s a place for you to be successful and happy along the spectrum. We’re still evolving ourselves, and definitions are less important to us than what we’re able to practice every day. Btw, yes, seafood is meat, but many people are more than comfortable in pescatarian mode; we no longer are.
- Situations where a plant-based option is not available to us are very rare these days, even out in public as more and more restaurants and venues offer valid and authentic vegetarian and vegan meals. But sometimes it happens that we can’t get what we’d like, and in those instances, our rules of engagement are 1) don’t be the problem, and 2) don’t go hungry. We can usually cobble something together out of sides or small plates, and if we have to forego protein for one meal it’s not the end of the world. No sense or satisfaction being militant.
- We’ve found that the quickest path to derailment is to try to make meals that replicate the meat and dairy you’re leaving behind. A plant-based burger for convenience every once in a while is fine, but not only are many plant-based equivalents themselves heavily-processed foods, they are open doors to regression or, if you want to look at it that way, cheating. Make the best of your fresh start by making friends with the concept of fresh whole foods.
Okay, on to the recommendations!
Cookbooks and websites
We love these first three resources as much as the changes they’ve brought to us, and they helped us in our decision to try plant-based as much as they are now the foundation of keeping us there. So much more than collections of recipes: the refreshing and sensible advice about how to start your transition, how to adapt your pantry and kitchen, how to change your shopping habits, how to swap out ingredients, how to be a plant-based badass, all of it is worth reading over and over again. And we do.
By far our favorite cookbook series is from the team at Bad*Manners (formerly Thug Kitchen). They are simply amazing, and their cookbooks of simple and delicious recipes are always the first we reach for. The original and best is Bad*Manners: The Official Cookbook, and if you do nothing else from this post, get this book: it is life-changing and you can find it at any bookstore, both online and in the real world. But we’re pretty sure you’ll end up getting them all: Brave New Meal, Hungry As Hell, Party Grub (those nachos!), and Fast As Fuck. A few months with these and your plant-based skills will be outstanding. Your profanity will be next level too. Their website has 20 pages of great recipe listings, along with a newsletter and a podcast, but there’s nothing like having these books in your hands and propped up on your kitchen counter. You can also follow along on almost all social media platforms.
Equally great but in a more understated way is the team at Forks Over Knives, which has produced a range of first-rate material, all referenced on their website. Their OG cookbook, The Forks Over Knives Plan, is a 4-week meal-by-meal makeover to help you transition and continue far beyond. We’re just starting to work through their newer cookbook, Flavor!, with good results. They offer a free Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to a Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet, available as a PDF for download. And the Forks Over Knives documentary film is a classic; more on that below. Also available to follow on most social media platforms.
We’ve found the best online resource to be VegNews. They describe themselves as “Your Ultimate Source for All Things Vegan” and they come pretty close. Recipes of course, lots of tips, industry news, editor’s picks, podcasts, and lists lists and more lists. Their gateway feature is How to Go Vegan: A Beginner’s Guide to Eating Plant-Based, an explainer and FAQ of the most common questions, along with a dozen other useful links. Like the others, you can follow VegNews on most social media platforms.
If you start with those 3 resources, you will be busy and satisfied for a long long time. But wait, there’s more. There’s no shortage of vegan or vegetarian cooking help and we can’t list them all here and it’s fun to go exploring online and in your local bookstore. Here are a few other resources worth special mention:
Although they are not all intended to be exclusively plant-based, and some do include recipes calling for meat and dairy, there are enough vegan, vegetarian, and easily-adaptable Mediterranean-style recipes in British chef Yotan Ottolenghi‘s cookbook series to occupy some substantial space on our bookshelves and in our meal plans. Sometimes you have to go digging, sometimes you need to make creative swaps, but there is absolute gold here. We have five of them—yes, five (links are to UK site but all are readily available in US). Easy places to start are Plenty, Plenty More and Flavor, his three cookbooks directed at vegetarians. Our favorite is Jerusalem, with dozens of incredibly delicious vegan-adaptable dishes. Simple is another excellent choice. He also has dozens of free recipes rotating seasonally on his website. Another must-follow on social media, especially on Instagram.
Wicked Kitchen is better known as a prepared food company, but we are going to spend more time with their cookbook this year, The Wicked Healthy Cookbook. Lots of recipes on the website and on their social media channels. And we are loooooong overdue in making their StickyBBQ Texas-Style Seitan Brisket—can’t wait to fire up the grill when the weather breaks.
And we are especially looking forward to the 2025 release of Miyoko’s Creamery founder Miyoko Schinner‘s new book on vegan cheese. She’s no longer associated with the company she founded (still great stuff, see Brands below), so for now we’ll follow along on her Instagram.
Like cookbooks, there is no shortage of social media influencers to follow. Some of our favorites are Richa Hingle (@veganricha), Lisa Myaf (@lisamyaf), Timothy Pakron (@mississippivegan), and the incredible Hannah Che (@hannahche), who also has cookbooks, including The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, but it’s her toasts that we treasure. There are so many others.
And last, because these vegan meat recipes are not easy, from prime plant-based meat and cheese company Field Roast (see Brands below), Field Roast: 101 Artisanal Vegan Meat Recipes to Cook, Share & Savor. We remain determined.
Documentary films and Series
We may all have come across the types of vegan documentaries that promise, if you watch them, that you’ll never eat meat again, and they’re right. We’ve listed a few at the bottom of this section, but we’d rather feature three that offer more positive messaging while still being honest about what happens before and after, and one series that wraps a more holistic approach around plant-based nutrition. There are a few hours of watching here, but do you know what? Less than 10 minutes watching these trailers might be enough to get anyone started.
Forks Over Knives Documentary (Amazon Prime or FOK website)
The basic whys and hows of a whole foods plant-based diet. Start here.
You Are What You Eat (Netflix)
A 2024 mini-series that uses twins to examine the even short-term health benefits of a vegan diet, along with some other foundational reasons for making the conversion. Four 45-minute episodes.
The Game Changers (Netflix)
Centers on maximizing athletic performance, but really a vegan showcase for any active (or would-be active) person.
Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones (Netflix)
Yes Dan Buettner brings along a bit of pop health culture, and the aim isn’t really to live to 100: it’s about being capable and alert well into older age via a holistic approach to health and activity and attitude. The magic of this series is lighting up how your new vegan diet can be wrapped in other positive, complementary approaches that amplify everything you do. Four episodes, each less than 45 minutes.
If you’d rather be outraged, scared or disgusted into it, you could try Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy, Earthlings, and Dominion (links to trailers only). Warning: we’ve never been able to sit through one of these. If you want to skip right to the hard part, watch Dominion.
Brands
Rather than make a list of all the new brands we’ve tried and use on a regular basis, we will defer to the cookbooks above which offer great education and recommendations on different products (what is Nooch?). Instead, we’ll offer just a few brands in a few categories where most people have some difficulty transitioning and choosing good replacements. Again, we’re not trying to replicate foods exactly, but if you need some advice while exploring the shelves or food cases, and you’d like to know what about this and what about that, here’s where you might want to start in sorting through what has become a landslide of choices. Btw the websites for these brands are full of free and creative recipes using their products.
Milk
Our everyday milk choice is unsweetened original Ripple plant-based milk, made from pea protein. It’s satisfying and delicious, and we use it in everything from recipes to our cereal. For steamed coffee drinks, we shift to Califa Farms Oat Barista Blend and Califa Farms Unsweetened Almond Blend — these both froth up really well even on home machines.
Eggs
Most cookbooks will give you several options for egg replacements in recipes, from flaxseed or chia mixtures to avocado, and they work pretty well. But if you want to use an easy equivalent, Just Egg is a great answer. Made from mung beans, these products are packed with protein and taste and cook up like real eggs. The pourable product is great for scrambles, and the folded product is excellent for sandwiches of all kinds especially breakfast sandwiches.
Butter & Sour Cream
While there are several great choices in this category, Miyoko’s Creamery butters are outstanding. Taste, texture, cooking, baking, you won’t miss the real thing. At all. Kite Hill’s Sour Cream Alternative is solid.
Cheese
Most people cite cheese at the reason they don’t go full vegan. We understand, and we know it’s hard—you’re not going to replace a French cheese board anytime soon, although there will come a time as artisanal vegan cheese production is very much on the upswing. Unfortunately not much has made its way to supermarkets yet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great products to use. Miyoko’s Creamery again comes in as an outstanding choice: their artisan cheeses, when you can find them, are excellent; their cheese spreads are easier to find and are guest-worthy. Mozzarella? Say no more: you can make a really nice caprese with their classic mozzarella, and we are looking forward to using their new pourable mozzarella product for pizzas. For cream cheese, it’s a toss up between Miyoko’s Cream Cheese collection and Kite Hill’s cream cheeses. We do prefer Kite Hill’s Ricotta Alternative. Slices and shreds can be a mixed bag, as most are serviceable and none really stand out except for Field Roast’s Chao Creamery products—we can make an amazing 4-cheese grilled cheese from those.
Meat
Lots to choose from here, and the usual suspects are fine: can’t go wrong with Beyond, Impossible, Gardein, Amy’s Kitchen, others. Most likely you’ll sample quite a few of these both in your own kitchen and out of your home, and they’ll be interchangeable. Even in this constellation there are some standouts. In addition to its cheeses, Field Roast has an amazing line-up of meat products, from sausages to burgers to appetizers to roasts to breakfast sandwiches. One we can’t live without is their Italian Garlic and Fennel sausage, which we mostly use for tomato sauce dishes, but also in tacos and bowls. Beyond’s Brats are a staple of our summer, and we prefer their Breakfast Sausage Classic Links to the others too. Abbot’s Butcher Chorizo is fantastic. We’re still mourning The Very Good Butchers, which had an awesome lineup until they expanded too quickly; if they ever make a comeback and you see their products online or in stores, go for it.
Ice Cream & Yogurt
Also a matter of experimenting from the waterfall of brands, but in this arena we prefer Ben & Jerry’s Dairy Non-Dairy Pints made from oat milk, So Delicious ice cream sandwiches bars made from either almond or coconut milk, and Kite Hill’s Greek Style Yogurt, add your own fruit.
Frozen entrees
Yes we try to avoid these as much as we can, but there’s always a rushed night and we usually have some in the freezer. Solid brands are Wicked Kitchen, Purple Carrot, Sweet Earth, and Amy’s Kitchen.
How will your shopping habits change? Just remember that you’re always better off in the produce section than the processed foods aisles and you’ll be fine. Everything we’ve mentioned here is available to us in our local supermarkets, and most big chains now have a decent vegan or vegetarian section. Our first stop is almost always Whole Foods. Trader Joe’s has a good lineup of vegan foods, most under their own label (VegNews has some helpful guides to TJ). Target is getting surprisingly strong, especially in the prepared meals department.
The final recommendation we have is about sourcing produce. Farmers markets and local farms, of course, are great. Nothing is better than your own backyard or container garden if you have room. The last few years we’ve upped our farm-to-table game by growing a good amount of our produce indoors a few feet from our kitchen in a hydroponic garden from Rise Gardens. Even in the middle of winter we have fresh basil, lettuces, tomatoes without leaving the house. Not for everyone, although even a small countertop garden is more than worthwhile.
Wrap up
Well that seems to be quite enough for one post for now. If you’ve read this far, thank you, and we hope we’ve provided some useful information to get you going to where you want to be, or, something to think about if you’re still not sure. We’re likely be making edits to this post over time as it will be our standard evergreen response to friends who ask us about it all. If you have questions or suggestions yourself, please leave them in the comments below–we’ll try our best to find some answers!
Earth Day reading
Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd, thought I’d share some books about climate change and the biosphere I’ve learned from and enjoyed the last few years, including a few on my stack that I’m eager to get to. These are serious messages for serious times.
Recommended
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
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Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
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David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
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Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
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Michael E. Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
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Peter Kalmus, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
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Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
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Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
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Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here
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Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
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Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
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Not discounting books by Bill McKibben and Al Gore, just been a while since major contributions.
On my stack
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Jake Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
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Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse
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Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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Related perspective
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Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
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Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
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Fiction
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Richard Powers, The Overstory
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Longtermism: “A giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.”
Of all the disturbing and predictable paths of the 21st century, Effective Altruism and its increasingly popular subcult of Longtermism are no longer the exclusive province of whackadoodles, but openly promoted by dangerous techbro white supremacist billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson who shape global policy and culture to justify and mirror their own world view of selfish moral leprosy. (Yes this is what all the personal space travel is about.)
At the heart of it all is Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence, a book I had long had on my reading pile which now currently resides in the trash, who argues that purging billions of humans now by letting them die in events like a climate catastrophe will provide increased value for the universe in the future, with human intelligence possibly living inside computer simulations a la The Matrix. They are serious in their beliefs. Since I bought the book Bostrom has been exposed as a white supremacist who believes that people of color in southern climates are expendable in a white future; Elon Musk is one of his biggest fans.
This is the eugenics of our time, and its adherents and frontmen are no different than extreme fundamentalists who believe in The Rapture, but in this scenario, with pre-emptive mass death actions driven by human choice while the Effective Altruists take on the role of gods.
This article is a long and important read that explains quite a lot of the political and media dynamics we’re currently experiencing, especially the resistance to taking any meaningful action on climate change. While we’re diverted and distracted by political speculation and vapid bickering, the entire world has been put into play by these maniacs. Highly recommended and well worth your time.
For the gun lobby, social media is the new video games
Great example of how the gun lobby and their Republican frontmen alter and misdirect the conversation about gun violence, especially when it comes to children. Here one of the smartest and most insightful leaders on the Internet spends time and energy defending social media as a motivator for teen suicide since 2008, when there is extensive public health data that shows that the increase in teen suicides is directly connected to a massive increase in guns in homes, which is why guns are now the leading cause of death for children: availability, efficiency. For the gun lobby, social media is the new video games, and a strategy of deflection always wins for them.
Foundations for talking about gun violence
With all the conversations about gun violence prevention spurred by the latest spike in mass shootings, it is incumbent upon us to be knowledgeable about data that informs those discussions and that may point towards realistic solutions. The information is not always what we think it is or what we’d like it to be, so, as I do every few months it seems, I’m going to share a few resources that I’ve found helpful that go far beyond searching for the latest and usually misinformed article or manufactured position to throw into another social media argument. None of these resources take positions or advocate either for or against gun policies; they do come to solid conclusions about what causes gun violence and what it might take to stop it.
Because the antidote to the common lines of misdirection, e.g.
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- “Mental illness”
- “Gun free zones”
- “What about Chicago?”
is a public health approach to a public health problem, based on
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- Factual data and evidence
- Risk-based analysis and policy recommendations
- Specific threat assessment
(Disclosure: I do not benefit in any way from the links that follow.)
The best resource I’ve come across is the free online version of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy’s course, Reducing Gun Violence in America: Evidence for Change. It requires a considerable time investment, 18 hours, but you will walk away with a solid education in gun policy from all points of view, as well as a solid and vetted range of data including studies from both the private and public sectors. May not change your mind or anyone else’s coming out the other side, but it is an impartial, reality-based examination of the issue across all of its dimensions. Can’t recommend this more highly as a great replacement for all the time we waste ingesting bad data and specious arguments on social media platforms. (Course is free, but $49 allows you to complete testing and receive a certificate.) The lead instructor is Daniel W. Webster, who is the author of Reducing Gun Violence in America; that book was published a decade ago, and the course is a much-need update and an all-around a better experience until he issues a revised edition.
Reducing Gun Violence in America: Evidence for Change
Offered by Johns Hopkins University. Reducing Gun Violence in America: Evidence for Change is designed to provide learners with the best ... Enroll for free.
The second resource is Louis Klarevas’ Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings. This is important and deeply-researched analysis drawing from a wide variety of source data and material. At 340 pages it’s a medium-length read. Turn off cable news and try this instead.
Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings|Hardcover
In the past decade, no individual act of violence has killed more people in the United States than the mass shooting. This well-researched, forcefully argued book answers some of the most pressing questions facing our society: Why do people go on killing sprees? Are gun-free zones magnets for…
Third is the recently published study by Jillian Peterson and James Densley, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, which relies not only on a solid file of evidence, but also is informed by blinded interviews with mass shooters and people who know them well.
The Violence Project Book
The Violence Project: How to Stop A Mass Shooting Epidemic
Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award (General Nonfiction)
Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award (General Nonfiction)
Fourth is another book that lights up what goes wrong when our conversations about gun violence, including the ones on social media that we all contribute to, go off the rails with misinformation: Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. Long but fast read.
Sandy Hook by Elizabeth Williamson: 9781524746582 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Carnegie Medal Nonfiction Longlist 2023 The Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Publishers Weekly Best Books 2022 Kirkus Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Slate Best Books 2022 Chicago Tribune…
This kind of foundation is essential for effective action and advocacy no matter from which direction any of us approach the issue. Those who propose new policy and practices or additional legislation, and those who consider themselves to be responsible and safe gun owners, all need a common understanding and a common language if we are to stop the fear and the slaughter. And make no mistake, it will take all of us. We better get started.
Leaving and locking down Twitter: 15 steps
Have shared this in posts in a few places, compiling in one place now.
*****
Here’s a relatively detailed process building out on the absolutely correct advice NOT to deactivate your account (your username would then become available in 30 days, and anyone could pick it up and impersonate you complete with blue verification check. You do not want that.) Try these 15 steps instead, best from a web browser and not the app.
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- Archive your data. If you haven’t already, create download an archive of your data. Settings and Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Your Account > Download an archive of your data. This will give you a complete file of your tweets and replies, but not followers, following, or DMs.
- Delete your tweets. After you’re satisfied with your archive, delete all of your tweets. A service like TweetDelete can do this in minutes depending on volume and how backed up they are. You will need to grant TweetDelete access to your account; when you’re done, remember to log out of TweetDelete.
- Notifications and Mentions are more difficult to clean up. From the main interface menu, choose Notifications then check the All and Mentions tabs. You can choose to leave conversations and/or block people you’ve interacted with. Won’t erase history entirely but will make it difficult to follow.
- Followers and following: there are no good solutions that I know of to archive followers and following, although I’m sure someone has built or is building a service to do it. I painstakingly went through and created new connective tissue to about 80% of the people and organizations I cared about most, via Substack, Medium, old school RSS, Mastodon and other fediverse tools, and, if nothing else was available, curated bookmarks. Whatever works for you for whatever you want to save. Also up to you if you want to delete all followers and following; this too would be a manual process.
- Account Information, part 1: delete as much as you can, especially your mobile phone number and if they somehow got it, your birth date. You may also want to reset your email address to the one you use for junk stuff. Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Your Account > Account Information.
- IMPORTANT Account information, part 2: While you’re in this area, make sure you set Protected Tweets to yes. This will lock down your account, and a lock icon will appear next to your username. Now only your followers know you exist and can see your stuff.
- Security and Account Safety: go through each and every page and shut everything down. Sever all connections with other apps and services, close any open session on other screens. Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Security and Account Access
- Privacy and Safety: review all the settings, shutting down whatever allows the world to look in, but pay careful attention to Content you see: wipe out any and all data points they have on you under the Topics and Interests sections, and remove the geo permission under Explore settings. Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Privacy and Safety
- Messages: delete all of your DMs from the Messages tab on the main menu. This will likely be a manual process. There may be a service that will do it for you, but not recommended if you have any sensitive information in those threads.
- Bookmarks: access from the main menu tab, clear all bookmarks with the button on the top of the page.
- Lists: access from the main menu tab, delete all of your lists one by one.
- Profile: access from the main menu tab, edit to remove any information you don’t want to remain. You may want to add a Fediverse addess if you’d like to leave bread crumbs for your followers. You may want to gray out or black out your profile and background photos to indicate you’re no long present.
- Change your password and make it a good strong one. Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Your Account > Change Your Password
- Log out.
- Wipe out: Finally, remove Twitter apps from all phones, tablets, computers. If you have the patience, clear Twitter cookies (x.twitter.com, ads-twitter.com) from all web browsers. Audit the rest of your Internet presence and eliminate all links to or mentions of your Twitter account; this includes link menus on your blog, email signatures, LinkedIn accounts, etc. If your browser provides the option for social media blocking, disallow Twitter embedded tweets.
As we all know, the Internet is forever and there will be ghosts and shadows and remnants left behind on Twitter servers and others. But if you do all of these things, you’ll have done everything you can to keep your identity safe and to lock down your data. Now breathe.
If I’ve overlooked anything, please feel free to add.
Coda: really want to get serious about leaving Twitter behind, use your browser to block embedded tweets in any content. Native to Brave, plugins for others.
The Messenger
Valentyn Sylvestrov is a living Ukrainian classical composer, born in Kyiv in 1937. This lovely piece, The Messenger, was written in 1996, five years after Ukraine declared independence from the former Soviet Union, in memory of his wife, Larysa, who had passed away unexpectedly.
Sylvestrov said it is about loss, and return. In bearing witness to what is happening in his country this winter, may we all be thankful for what we have, for what we’ve lost, from where we’ve returned.
As with all of her work, the pianist, Hélène Grimaud, plays stunningly.
The world needs more pie, yes it does
One of the best expressions of thankfulness and gratitude I can share this holiday season is an introduction to my friend Beth Howard and her amazing and inspiring mission to help heal through the making and sharing of pie. Magnificent in its simplicity, powerful in impact. Lots to explore on her website, from the books which make great gifts to exploring pieces of her story. Enjoy and pass along.
The World Needs More Pie – “Give a Piece a Chance.” — Books. Blog. Pie Classes. And a Pinch of Activism.
“Pie is accessible, affordable, all-encompassing. Pie is meant for sharing. Pie connects people. Pie knows no cultural or political boundaries. Pie makes people happy. And happy people make the world a better place. That’s why the world needs more pie.” — BETH HOWARD
“Public good at a protocol level”
Murmurations online
Interesting article on the murmurations of social media behavior. Interesting timing as the bird platform collapses.
Beyond information warfare
When I suggest to people they should be more careful about their online behaviors, like posting for fake National Daughters and Sons Days, and answering random questions on random Facebook accounts, and including having Chinese-government-owned apps like TikTok on their phones, this is why. Not a joke and not a drill.
tl;dr “Chinese theorists…believe that the development of information technology has reached its limits, and that future wars will occur in the cognitive domain. … Influencing human cognition requires a large amount of detailed personal information to identify influential individuals or to conduct influential operations according to the characteristics of subgroups of people. China has already collected a massive amount of personal information on government officials and ordinary U.S. citizens, ensuring a foundation for influencing people’s cognition. … The Chinese government has then allowed Chinese IT giants to process this large amount of data, making it useful for intelligence activities. In this way, China has accumulated an enormous amount of data over the years which could be weaponized in the future.”
Gun violence rooted in misogyny
Absolutely on the mark. Hatred and resentment of women is behind an amazing amount of right-wing aggressiveness. Guns, education, healthcare, child care, reproductive rights, right down the line. So clear and easy to see. Harder to deal with, but we must.
[from Elle]
American agriculture is a lie
The romance of the American farmer is a total myth–straight out propaganda–in today’s America, representing only 2-3% of food production. The rest is from food factories that are destroying the planet, backed by the most powerful lobbying groups in DC.
[from The New York Times]
Concentric circles of gun violence trauma
Not many things–nothing, in fact–gets to me the way this issue does. Now, because of what happened to them, their children have to undergo active shooter drills, expanding the concentric circles of trauma.
The school shooting generation grows up
After coming of age in a world wholly unprepared to deal with the aftermath, an early wave of survivors is now in their 30s and 40s.
Another self-inflicted existential threat to humanity
In addition to overheating the planet, we have chemically altered its makeup.
“The rate at which novel entities are being developed and produced by industry exceeds governments’ ability to assess risk and monitor impacts.”
[from Mongabay]
We’ve breached Earth’s threshold for chemical pollution, study says
Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time — so many, in fact, that scientists now say we’ve crossed a critical threshold that heightens the risk of destabilizing the entire Earth operating syst…
Guiding principles for The Great Resignation
Not everyone has $2.5 million, but it probably works with less.
“Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don’t drink. That’s all I have to say to anybody on any social level.”
The Ultimate Doomscroll
Essentially my Twitter feed, beautifully compiled.
“I understand climate change as doing something similar to what Dr. Johnson said the hangman’s noose did for focusing the mind. It’s not words that I’m worried about wasting, but experiences. What’s needed is an aesthetic imperative that we somehow live in each moment as if it’s eternal and also as if it’s our last. Our ethical imperative is similar: to do everything as if it might save the world, even if it’s unlikely that it will. Tending one’s own garden need not be selfish, though if everyone does so, well, that’s something then, right? “
Networked interpretive communities of resentment
Fascinating study about how conservatives see media, and, really, the entire world around them.
[from Columbia Journalism Review]
Unmasking Polarization: How Conservatives Make Sense of Covid19 Coverage
A companion study offering an overview of projects that attempt to tackle the challenges of polarization and sectarian divisions can be read here. Executive Summary Distrust in the “mainstream media” is now a central tenet of American conservatism, and this skepticism has consequences: Democrat…
Plant-based or vegan?
I’ve taken to calling myself plant-based. This is a helpful and empathetic discussion of terms, definitions, and what they mean in practical life.
Ultimate vegan road trip
Divest
Decarbonize the grid.
“Endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth just shy of $40 trillion have now committed to full or partial abstinence from coal, gas and oil stocks…that’s larger than the gross domestic product of the United States and China combined.”
Murmurations
Come for the science, stay for the incredible photos.
[from Nautilus]
Next up
Having been at a couple of dying companies, and a dying industry, I can say with some authority that it’s exactly as described.
What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.
Beyond smart cities
Fascinating review. Made me think about Singapore, and what Amazon has done to Seattle, and Hudson Yards in New York, and the new smart neighborhoods planned for Chicago. Ordering the book.
Two interesting ideas from down a ways in the essay:
One: “At the turn of the 20th century, the twin infectious disease threats of tuberculosis and the Spanish flu combined with faddish ideas on wellness among people rich enough to afford their own architects, and led to something new. As the architectural historian Biatriz Colomina has written, that was Modernism, with its clean lines, honest materials, porous relationship between the indoors and outdoors, more sunlight, more ventilation, and solid surfaces that were easy to clean. It was more than an aesthetic. It was disease control.”
Two: “Humans build cities as fortresses against failure: economic collapse, natural catastrophe, human venality and cowardice. The city walls keep those things out, when they work. If houses are, as the architect Mies van de Rohe said, “machines for living,” then cities are places where those machines get daisy-chained into a society. Cities are machines for cooperation, and survival.”
[from Wired]
Also reminded of a companion piece about the work of an acquaintance from college, an architect who has turned to imaging what truly inclusive, pandemic-resistant buildings might look like.
“Through the front door, in a vestibule, one-way entry and exit routes were mediated by a planter. Each side had a hand-sanitizing station along the wall. A second, interior door separated this transition zone from the rest of the building. Once inside, a visitor encountered a wide lobby. Across it, directly ahead, an information desk was positioned back-to-back with a bank of lockers. Behind that partition were multigender restroom stalls; rooms, with showers, that could be used by caregivers, nursing mothers and even bike commuters; and prayer rooms and foot-washing stations for religious practices. Motion-activated sinks abutted the walkway. The space is more of a “wellness hub” now than a “bathroom,” Sanders said — so they decided to put it front and center rather than hide it.”
[from The New York Times Magazine]
Sovereign American freedom as the freedom to enslave others
Astonishingly insightful essay. We have a real problem here.
“The defense of white freedom in U.S. history might more accurately be thought of as racialized anti-statism, in which the federal government is understood as a usurper of individual and states’ rights.”
Propaganda and misinformation don’t spread themselves
Excellent and powerful analysis of the digital world we’ve built over the last 20 years and the underlying, and perhaps catastrophic, problems that are at its foundation. Not only is the Internet we imagined in 1995 better than the Internet we have today, it wasn’t nearly as harmful.
Beyond disinformation: smokescreen trolling
Cruelty as a service
Absolutely spot on.
“In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.”
Opinion | The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump
Why there was Trumpism long before Trump — and there will be long afterward.
Revealing the source of the single-use plastics crisis
The Fifth Crime
International lawyers, environmentalists and a growing number of world leaders say “ecocide”—widespread destruction of the environment—would serve as a “moral red line” for the planet.
As the Climate Crisis Grows, a Movement Gathers to Make ‘Ecocide’ an International Crime Against the Environment - Inside Climate News
The Fifth Crime: First in a continuing series with NBC News about the campaign to make “ecocide” an international crime. In 1948, after Nazi Germany exterminated millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II, the United Nations adopted a convention establishing a new crime so heinous it …
The machined exoskeleton of legitimacy and validation in platform politics
The call is coming from inside the house, and the house next door, and the house down the street. Or maybe it’s the voices of the miniature parents in Mulholland Drive. Or maybe the only way to win against machine-enabled synchronized and synthesized human revolt, as in War Games, is not to play.
While online behavior is certainly shaped by platform mechanisms, the fear today is less of the mechanisms themselves than of whom they’re enticing. Prior emphasis on the machine threat warned of the unpredictability of automated behavior and the need for humans to develop policies to control it. Today’s emphasis on the social media terror inverts this, warning of the danger posed by unchecked digital mobs, who must be controlled. The risk comes not from the machines but from ourselves: our vulnerability to deception and manipulation, our need to band together with others to hunt down and accost our adversaries online, our tendency to incite and be incited by violent rhetoric to act out in the physical world, and our collective habit of spiraling down into correlated webs of delusion, insanity, and hatred.
While amenable in theory to fears of machine malevolence, there is no real mechanical equivalent in this picture to the central role played by the runaway machine of old. Actually, the roles of humans and machines have switched: The machines must now restrain the dangerous humans.
Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords — The New Atlantis
How warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting
Related:
“We are incentivized, by the coded logic of the social media platforms where public engagement now takes place, to find reasons to hate each other…The conflicts taking place over freedom, justice, and other noble ideas are captive performances in the most technologically advanced human cockfighting enterprise ever designed—one that has converted the essence of human struggle into a sure-win bet for the tech platforms who play the house.“
Human Sacrifice and the Digital Business Model
Debates over free speech ignore the deeper problem: The tech monopolies that control social media have built their profit model on burnt offerings to the digital platform god
Also related:
The heightened scrutiny of the political uses to which social media has been put is necessary and important. But it tends to miss a critical aspect of our situation. Much of the analysis tacitly assumes that our underlying political structures and values have remained relatively stable, that they will not fundamentally change — even if they must be defended against the usual illiberal suspects, who deploy digital media in their efforts to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. If only Zuck would take more aggressive measures to purge Facebook of fake news, and if only Jack would ban all the Nazis from Twitter, then all would be well and we could proceed with business as usual. Much like the proverbial generals who always fight the last war, however, we will be undone in our efforts to make sense of our moment and to respond productively if we don’t recognize that digital media is reconfiguring our politics at a more fundamental level.
The Analog City and the Digital City — The New Atlantis
How online life breaks the old political order
Who will write the digital update to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power? Where he excavated primal cultures and orthodox religions, the dynamics of our political world are enabled in a digital layer of meta-activities.
The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Sung in the Indigenous Mi’kmaq Language
One of the nicer things you’ll see online today.
The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Sung in the Indigenous Mi’kmaq Language
Mi’kmaq language, an Eastern Algonquian language spoken by nearly 11,000 in Canada and the United States. A member of the Eskasoni First Nation, the Nova Scotia student sang lyrics that were painstakingly translated by Katani Julian, a teacher who works in language revitalization.
America as Attica, 2021
In Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die, his personal account from being an observer during the Attica prison uprising in 1971, he described the unfolding dynamic of the scene when he first arrived and had to pass through camps of heavily-armed State Troopers:
… so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting upon the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are in hand, the question of those who have them ultimately becomes, “Why not use them?” The more weapons, the more insistent the question; and the burden of explaining why not to use them falls on those who have no guns. But those who have no guns have little credence with those who do.
[p.32, Haymarket Books edition]
And in this, we have a description of the state of America today.
A Time to Die
The essential first hand account of the Attica Prison rebellion, back in print for the 40th anniversary of the uprising
An elegy in advance for our shorelines
Just finished Elizabeth Rush’s amazing book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. A climate change book but not laden with scientific explanations—it’s more of an elegy for places we’ve lost and places we’re about to lose in this next Meltwater Pulse.
We’re already far down that road in Louisiana, in Florida, in the New York City area, in the San Francisco Bay area, and the human cost of the inevitable organized retreat the the will be not only inimpact the loss of property and the relocation of infrastructure, but in the mourning of those places we know and love and will not be able to take care of: beaches and wetlands, towns and cities, and for tens of millions of Americans, home.
We tend to think in human periods of the five generations we know (grandparents, parents, us, children, grandchildren) or in financial terms (30 years mortgages) or political cycles (4 year presidential terms, 6 years Senate terms); the earth has a different ebb and flow, and we’re about to be flooded out not with gradual rise over centuries as we’ve been telling ourselves, but in a short pulse of melting ice. The world has been here before and scientists know exactly what’s coming, and coming quickly. While we’re in the phase of desperately trying to buy some time, this book is well worth reading so we can start to make peace with the future we have cast for ourselves and our children. Highly recommended.
Suggested reading for Black History Month
More than suggestions, really. Highly recommended for every American, and for every white American, very necessary. Even the best-intentioned whites don’t know what they don’t know, about the history and foundations of the country; about the institutionalized conventions of race and caste embedded throughout our society, our language, our behaviors; about what is still walking the streets and the halls of power trying to return to a dark time most of us thought was long past; about the sheer terror of that past, and how it still plays out and plagues us all today.
Reading does not and cannot replace experience, and understanding only goes so far, but we can start. Everyone in America lives in one house, whether we built it or not. Knowing how we are defined by our surroundings and our relationships, knowing that the truth is not always the one we have been taught or choose to hold on to, those are the first steps to being able to repair that house and to make the reality of our country after the vision which, in this century at least, so many of us claim we share.
These are my personal recommendations, non-fiction edition. (Next time I may address fiction and film.)
Nota bene: these are life-altering books. You will be challenged, especially if you are white. You will cry. You will come out different on the other side.
If I could name only two, I would start with these two masterpieces by Isabel Wilkerson. Absolutely magnificent. Neither are tremendously long, but they do require a commitment; both can be easily read within the month. The first tells the story of the Great Migration using a narrative non-fiction convention tracing the lives of three real people, one who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s, another from Florida to New York in the 1940s, and a third from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1950s. Absolutely riveting and illuminating, and one of the best books of any kind I have ever read. The second is an examination of America today, recent history through the pandemic, and why it became that way, calling out parallels to the Indian caste system and America’s contribution to the Nazis, who modeled the Jim Crow era to advance their own drive towards white supremacy.
- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)
- Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (2020)
These next are much shorter reads, and in their condensation, very intense personal accounts of what it is like to be a person of color within our lifetimes. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes his story as a letter to his teenage son. I was so moved by this book that I gave a copy to my own son, who will soon be a first-time father, as a reminder to him that fathers of one are fathers to all, and that we all have accountability and responsibility to a larger good. James Baldwin wrote several autobiographical books, none more powerful than The Fire Next Time, which is a great companion piece to Between the World and Me. Each can be read over a couple of nights, Baldwin in one sitting.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.
I read Taylor Branch‘s series America in the King Years over ten years ago, before the most recent wave of racial tension. These histories are what most white Americans think of when they think of Black History: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. And this is an excellent and thorough accounting over thousands of pages. Well worth the time. The limitation is that it is written by a white man, and once you read Isabel Wilkerson’s books, you can easily see that this kind of reporting is only part of the story, and not necessarily the main part. Necessary and valuable but don’t stop here.
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
- Taylor Branch, Pillars of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965 (1998)
- Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (2006)
Taylor Branch | Taylor Branch | American author and historian | The King Years | The King Era Trilogy | The Clinton Tapes | The Cartel
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch presents The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President
What’s on my list for this February? I’m continuing to make peace with Toni Morrison after that unfortunate personal incident 40+ years ago (will write a separate post about that soon). Have been long overdue on Michelle Alexander‘s book, and have too wide of a knowledge gap on Malcolm X and his influence.
- Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (2017)
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010; new edition 2020)
- Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (2020)
The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander
“One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.”
—Chronicle of Higher Education
—Chronicle of Higher Education
Also, already purchased, and on the reading stack for later in the year:
- W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
- Chancellor Williams, Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1992)
- Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
Obviously this list of recommendations is not complete, and there are so many others to add — certainly much more Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Angela Davis’ Women Race & Class, Joshua Bloom’s Black Against Empire, many others. I can say with some confidence that none of the books I mentioned here should be left off. Good reading, and please let me know what you think.
Top 100 Movies (well, 95 at least)
Supporting a discussion elsewhere on social media, here are my top 100 films of all time, highly subjective of course, arranged alphabetically. Cut it at 95 to leave some room for films I’ve probably forgotten about or which are on a near-term watchlist that have a chance to make it. Admittedly there’s a fair amount of junk and pop culture on here as I’m a product of my time, and I wouldn’t change the channel on any one of these. Sorry, no Citizen Kane. Documentaries would be a separate list.
-
-
- After Hours
- Alien
- All the Presidents Men
- Animal House
- Annie Hall
- Amarcord
- Amadeus
- Apocalypse Now
- Armageddon
- Badlands
- Bacurau
- Belle de Jour
- The Bicycle Thief
- Blow Up
- Body Heat
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s
- Breathless
- Boondock Saints
- Brokeback Mountain
- Casablanca
- Claire’s Knee
- Cleo from 5 to 7
- Close-up
- Coco
- La Collectionneuse
- Contempt
- The Dark Knight
- Day for Night
- Day of the Jackal
- Dead Poets Society
- The Deer Hunter
- Deliverance
- The Departed
- Do the Right Thing
- Die Hard
- Dr. Strangelove
- Dog Day Afternoon
- Easy Rider
- Fargo
- Field of Dreams
- Forrest Gump
- Gladiator
- The Godfather (Part 1)
- The Godfather (Part 2)
- Goodfellas
- The Graduate
- The Great Escape
- Hiroshima Mon Amour
- House of Games
- In the Heat of the Night
- Lion King
- Local Hero
- Jaws
- Jules and Jim
- Jurassic Park
- Kill Bill 1 & 2
- Last Year at Marienbad
- A Man for All Seasons
- A Married Woman
- The Matrix
- Mean Streets
- Memento
- Moneyball
- Mulholland Drive
- No Country for Old Men
- Ocean’s 11
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- Platoon
- Pretty Woman
- The Professional
- Psycho
- Pulp Fiction
- Raging Bull
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Ran
- Renoir
- The Right Stuff
- Rio Bravo
- Rome: Open City
- Scarface (1983)
- Se7en
- Shakespeare in Love
- Silence of the Lambs
- Swept Away
- Taxi Driver
- The Taking of Pelham 123 (original)
- Toy Story
- True Romance
- Variety
- Viridiana
- Vivre sa vie
- Without Limits
- Working Girl
- Z
-
Whiteness vs. the common good
Outstanding new essay by Gregory Rodriguez on where the partisan divide in American is and has always been–race, of course, but with the added dimension of assimilated “whiteness”–with a nuanced discussion of how Puritanical religious themes, and not the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are used to reinforce white supremacy, deny not only race but ethnicity, and detour the abstract political idea of American patriotism into the fracture of self-interest we are experiencing today, manifested in the response to the pandemic. This is a serious and very worthwhile read.
“Once the glue to an imperfect type of social cohesion, whiteness now threatens to undermine the social contract altogether. The reluctance that we have witnessed over the past months of both millions of individuals to wear masks and for state and local governments to mandate it were just the most glaring examples of a trend that’s been building for decades. The massive loss of human life will do nothing to change this. The meaning of America, the role of race in it, and a peculiar brand of nation building have allowed the emptiness of whiteness to even pass as nationalism. And once again, as whites continue to shed any semblance of communal tradition, they grab onto patriotic symbols and ideology in an attempt to anchor themselves. But neither symbolism nor the constant attempt to reignite white cohesion by demonizing nonwhites both at home and abroad will make unhyphenated whites feel more secure in the world. The usual talismans will do nothing to keep them from falling through the latticework that is America. Meanwhile, they’re pushing the entire nation ever closer to the void.”
Whiteness: An American TragedyPart I: The Glue and the Fuel Almost every country in the developed world put its economy on ice for a few months this year. But none has seen its unemployment rate rise as high as Ameri…
“Wall of Criminality”
Before there is a final solution
Starting to make my peace with Toni Morrison after that unfortunate encounter in the ’70s, now best forgotten after her passing (about which, regrettably, I may have said some not nice things).
Picked up a release of her essays which included a portion of her speech on Racism and Fascism, delivered at Howard University in 1995. It’s the passage that famously starts…
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
…and builds to this magnificent peroration:
“It changes citizens into taxpayers…it changes neighbors into consumers…it changes parenting into panicking…we find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see through a screen darkly.”
Okay, I’m with her. Here’s the original video of the speech; she altered it slightly for publication (book below). After I’m done with that, may even have to pick up my copy of Song of Solomon again, which has been frozen in time since 1977 with a bookmark on page 109.
[from C-SPAN]
The book is currently widely available in paperback:
Our votes are not enough
Important essay. Our problems are huge and cannot be fixed with one vote.
“Viewing the solution to these problems as simply electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both underestimates the depth of the problems and trivializes the remedies necessary to undo the damage.”
[from The New Yorker]
Progress beyond politics
Very thoughtful piece by climate change activist Bill McKibben on how we can make progress the next few years.
First, take care of everyone during the shift: “Any plan needs to focus on making sure that workers currently building oil pipelines have something else to build instead.”
And second, realize that movements are stronger than politics, and with that strength politicians can be moved:
“The Sunrise Movement, in the wake of a tough primary loss for their guy Bernie Sanders, didn’t walk away. They partnered effectively with the Biden campaign, helping reach a shared policy platform and then delivering millions of phone-banking calls. They are, in other words, a power — probably the most important electoral force in the environmental movement at this point.”
[from YaleEnvironment360]
Learning How to Talk: What Climate Activists Must Do in the Biden Era
A broad coalition brought Joe Biden to victory. If activists want real progress on climate in a Biden administration, environmentalist Bill McKibben writes, they need to learn how to press their case aggressively without alienating those they must work with to get things done.
White supremacy, expanded and rebranded
“He also gave our unique brand of ugliness — rooted in racism, exceptionalism, recklessness, arrogance and a tendency to bully our way to power — a name. Trumpism is now rooted in the lexicon, and although white supremacy may be the better, more clinical term for what ails America, Trumpism is a useful, colloquial alternative. It encompasses an even wider category of people that includes not just avowed racists who have publicly supported the president but also those who downplay the problem, or align with it for personal gain, or are simply unwilling to acknowledge its history and persistence.”
Plenty more where that came from
He’s only the first. Two words: Tom Cotton.
[from Foreign Affairs]
The grandest illusion of them all
We can’t understand what we refuse to see. And America refuses to see beyond its front porch. Essay of the week.
“…merely adding a few unfamiliar names to the curriculum, something already fiercely resisted by the conservative and reactionary right, won’t advance global thinking, as distinct from the institutional aims of “inclusivity” and “diversity.” Something more radical and arduous will be required to avoid the total conceptual loss suffered by the Crow Indians: the interrogation of an intellectual tradition that distorts our sense of reality, and the relearning of world history, with the recognition that fundamental assumptions about the inferiority of nonwhite peoples have tainted much of our previous knowledge and analysis.”
[from The New York Review of Books]
